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Comment by justinweiss | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth:

ev: "@TechCrunch @arrington "we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information" What?! By whom? That's not our understanding"

(http://twitter.com/ev/status/2676203744)

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Alright, that's pretty damning. As of now, I'm jumping on the "let's ban Techcrunch links from HN" bandwagon.

As much as I'd love to see this happen (more power to VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb and, hell, even Mashable), Paul and Mike are friends so it's not happening. As much as I get my hopes up every month when this debate comes up, the guy who controls the bans has been pretty consistent on his position here.

Wow had no idea personal relationships were the factor overriding community pressure.

TechCrunch also gives YCombinator sites tons of write-ups. It's not anything underhanded, just a relationship that both sides benefit from - at the cost of the people who think Hacker News would be better without Arrington's peculiar brand of self-righteous yellow journalism.

If people stop voting them up, then there's no need to ban them.

Banning the domain smacks of censorship. If people at HN want to discuss a TC article, lets give them a place to do it. The answer to ugly speech is more speech, not censorship.

That's true in the public square. It's not true when you're trying to build and maintain a specialized community. The opposite of censorship is 4chan.

Hey, it's a democratic site. People vote up the articles.

If the problem is that not enough people know that TechCrunch stinks, then you should add a post about how they stink. I'd vote for that.

You basically have to trust that a majority (or at least plurality) of the people here are the sorts of hackers you want to hang out with. If that stops being the case, you've got bigger problems than TC stories.

Well, a democratic site doesn't imply that there's no censorship; a true democracy would permit the majority to censor the minority. But anyway, even without any editors stepping in to ban certain links, the site doesn't really function according to the wishes of the majority because there's no down arrow on stories. Getting to the top of the front page doesn't require majority support, but just enthusiastic minority support.

I think this is probably something that looks worse than it is. I can't see them flat out lying. I suspect they've been talking to marketing who said something like "we really wish you wouldn't publish this but if you're going to please..." followed by some requests as to how the information is presented. They then expressed that sentiment as "Twitter has given us the green light".

(Still a bit of misrepresentation but not the flat out lie it appears to be)

I could be wrong. But in a world where the CEO of Twitter can so quickly call B#S* I can't envision a scenario where TechCrunch doesn't have some explanation

I'm not sure how this could look a lot worse than it already is. If they asked really nicely and just annoyed Twitter into allowing this to be published, TechCrunch's actions are still appalling.

There's no way around it: what TechCrunch is doing is incentivizing the kinds of attacks Twitter is dealing with. Twitter will survive this, but a lot of the kinds of companies represented on Hacker News won't.

Well, I would say that does change things significantly. That's what I get for trusting what TC says in their articles.

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